Pictured: "Returned Wealth" by Richie Brasil. Courtesy of the artist.

While the custom T-shirts in his one-artist-show, The Many Faces of Richie Brasil, have been getting attention, there's another aspect of Brasil's show that shouldn't be missed, one with a bit of a story.

Visiting friends and family in Boston, Brasil stops in his brother’s vintage shop—a friend asked for postcards and Brasil thought vintage would be funny. The shop is cool and so is his brother and he leaves with booklets of old snapshots ready for a postmark. He gets a good deal. Brasil forgets about them until it comes time to pack for the return trip home. He opens one up then, he says, “and they were the most appalling images you’d ever seen.”

Flip: two black children hoist a watermelon between them and grin. Flip: a young black boy in ragged clothes lays his head on a sack of cotton in beatific repose. Flip: the photographer doubles down and lays three black children in an even bigger pile of the stuff—all smiles. It’s a record of early-20th-century racism more than any traveler’s keepsake. Brasil’s shocked, shaken and hurt, but can’t throw them away. “The more I sat with them,” he says, “it dawned on me that I had this opportunity to, in a sense, repaint history.”

Working in a series of triptychs, Brasil’s ensuing series, Foo’s Gold, reimagines these racist artifacts to capture “how innocent they could have been.” Under Brasil’s brush (or finger), watermelons become bulging treasure chests and cotton bales become river chop and patched clothes become three-piece suits. But the key word is repaint history, not to paint over. Each reimagined image is presented next to the original and a copy with the word VOID red-stamped across. The reality remains and the reimagining is still a lie in its way, says Brasil, and the series is called Foo’s Gold for a reason.

With a handful complete, Brasil says there are many more to come, fueled by many more images—some far worse. It can be painful, he says, but that only furthers the need. “This can be a way of starting dialogue about race in America so people can have an honest conversation about how things are and how things were,” says Brasil. “I don’t necessarily have all the answers, but dialogue is important right now.”

Selections from Foo’s Gold are currently on display as part of Brasil’s one-man-show The Many Faces of Richie Brasil exhibiting at Solid.

Pictured: "Returned Wealth" by Richie Brasil. Courtesy of the artist.